Introduction / by Edward Friedman and Roderick MacFarquhar -- Translators' note -- A chronology of the great famine -- An everlasting tombstone -- The epicenter of the disaster -- The three red banners : source of the famine -- Hard times in Gansu -- Thepeople's commune : foundation of the totalitarian system -- The communal kitchens -- Hungry ghosts in heaven's pantry -- The ravages of the five winds -- Anxious in Anhui -- The food crisis -- Turnaround in Lushan -- China's population loss in the great leap forward -- The official response to the crisis -- Social stability during the great famine -- The systemic causes of the great famine -- The great famine's impact on Chinese politics -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Reviews and Notes

An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster."

As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.

Tombstone is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, Tombstone is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in The New York Review of Books , called the Chinese edition of Tombstone "groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."

$a Introduction / by Edward Friedman and Roderick MacFarquhar -- Translators' note -- A chronology of the great famine -- An everlasting tombstone -- The epicenter of the disaster -- The three red banners : source of the famine -- Hard times in Gansu -- Thepeople's commune : foundation of the totalitarian system -- The communal kitchens -- Hungry ghosts in heaven's pantry -- The ravages of the five winds -- Anxious in Anhui -- The food crisis -- Turnaround in Lushan -- China's population loss in the great leap forward -- The official response to the crisis -- Social stability during the great famine -- The systemic causes of the great famine -- The great famine's impact on Chinese politics -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.